News Media Framing of Suicide Circumstances and Gender: Mixed Methods Analysis.

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  • Additional Information
    • Source:
      Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc Country of Publication: Canada NLM ID: 101658926 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 2368-7959 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 23687959 NLM ISO Abbreviation: JMIR Ment Health Subsets: MEDLINE
    • Publication Information:
      Original Publication: Toronto : JMIR Publications Inc., [2014]-
    • Subject Terms:
      Suicide*/psychology ; Suicide*/statistics & numerical data ; Mass Media*/statistics & numerical data ; Social Stigma*; Humans ; Female ; Male ; Sex Factors ; Adult
    • Abstract:
      Background: Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide. Journalistic reporting guidelines were created to curb the impact of unsafe reporting; however, how suicide is framed in news reports may differ by important characteristics such as the circumstances and the decedent's gender.
      Objective: This study aimed to examine the degree to which news media reports of suicides are framed using stigmatized or glorified language and differences in such framing by gender and circumstance of suicide.
      Methods: We analyzed 200 news articles regarding suicides and applied the validated Stigma of Suicide Scale to identify stigmatized and glorified language. We assessed linguistic similarity with 2 widely used metrics, cosine similarity and mutual information scores, using a machine learning-based large language model.
      Results: News reports of male suicides were framed more similarly to stigmatizing (P<.001) and glorifying (P=.005) language than reports of female suicides. Considering the circumstances of suicide, mutual information scores indicated that differences in the use of stigmatizing or glorifying language by gender were most pronounced for articles attributing legal (0.155), relationship (0.268), or mental health problems (0.251) as the cause.
      Conclusions: Linguistic differences, by gender, in stigmatizing or glorifying language when reporting suicide may exacerbate suicide disparities.
      (©Jasmine C Foriest, Shravika Mittal, Eugenia Kim, Andrea Carmichael, Natalie Lennon, Steven A Sumner, Munmun De Choudhury. Originally published in JMIR Mental Health (https://mental.jmir.org), 03.07.2024.)
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    • Contributed Indexing:
      Keywords: LLM; LLMs; NLP; digital mental health; disparities; framing; gender; glorification; glorify; glorifying; journalism; journalist; journalists; language model; language models; linguistic; linguistics; mHealth; machine learning; media; natural language processing; news; reporter; reporters; reporting; reporting guidelines; self harm; stigma; stigmatization; stigmatizing; suicidal; suicide; suicides
    • Publication Date:
      Date Created: 20240703 Date Completed: 20240703 Latest Revision: 20240720
    • Publication Date:
      20240720
    • Accession Number:
      PMC11255531
    • Accession Number:
      10.2196/49879
    • Accession Number:
      38959061